1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to Wireless Signal Collection Systems and, more specifically, to a Method and System For Optimizing The Efficiency of SIGINT Collection Systems on Mobile Platforms with Limited Bandwidth Connections.
2. Description of Related Art
Over recent years, Government and Military mobile (air or ground-based) signals intelligence (SIGINT) platforms have increasingly had to deal with more and more challenges. These challenges include denser signal environments, wider frequency range targets, frequency-hopping targets, and even communications signals appearing on traditional microwave frequency bands (frequency ranges formerly only used only for radar type signals). These increased challenges have resulted in increasing the raw output of existing SIGINT collection systems to the point where it is now infeasible to send back the resulting large amounts of data in real time for control/command center processing.
The air-ground, or ground-air-ground links used to link the mobile platforms to the control/command centers have limited wireless communications bandwidths. Furthermore, due to the cost and complexity, it is impractical to increase these bandwidths. Thus, in order to keep up with changing RF environments, vast increases in the efficiency of the SIGINT collection techniques are needed
More advanced approaches must be researched and adopted to increase the efficiency of SIGINT collection. Clear innovations and next generation advancements in DSP, wideband digital scanning, high speed processing and datastream optimization algorithms are required to handle these modern challenges.
What is needed is a method and system to automatically adjust to varying bandwidth downlinks. The data throughput restrictions will be dealt with by adaptively prioritizing (and then throttling) the collected SIGINT datastreams to match the maximum allowable bandwidth at any moment, in real-time. This will completely maximize the mobile platform's downlink capability, no matter what the available bandwidth is. It will create SIGINT platform efficiencies heretofore not experienced and would extend the lifespan of the existing fleet of signals intelligence gathering aircraft/vehicles/ships. What is needed are unique approaches, unique techniques and algorithms for SIGINT platforms that can allow them to: automatically scan the RF spectrum with extreme speed, ignore whitespace regions, automatically focus and filter signals, and to have advanced signal-of-interest (SOI) prioritization algorithms based on real-time feedback from the datalink subsystem. Such a digital signal processing system would thus create far richer collected datasets.